Writing anxiety and writing block are informal terms that are used to denote pessimistic and anxious feeling about writing. Researches showed that the majority of students exhibit unusually strong apprehension about writing. This debilitating condition forces students to avoid majors, jobs, and courses that require writing.
In fact, having some level of writing anxiety can help you concentrate, really your thoughts together, and devote all of them to writing. However, in excessive quantities it can become a hindrance; here is where the actual problem lies.
Some experienced writers claim that this feeling has the situational character and is not pervasive in person’s writing life. Others say that writing block and anxiety show up only during our most stressful deadline-driven periods, and stay until we find the way to show them the door.
Writing anxiety encroaches upon a writer, who doesn’t know what to write about, or simply doesn’t know where to start writing, and is usually accompanied by (1) continuous procrastination of the writing tasks, (2) becoming nervous because of the impossibility to write anything at all, (3) quickening heartbeat, and sweaty palms.
All in all, every writer, at least once in his life, experiences moments, which create anxiety. Surely, there is a great deal of variations among individuals; however, there are some common experiences that writers can find stressful.
Writing anxiety can be a result of a great variety of social, academic, and personal factors. Some of them are: